CigarVolante - Making the world safe for cigar smokers...
She identified herself as a nurse, looked me in the eye and said, "How can you sell these terrible things that cause lung cancer, lip cancer and esophageal cancer?"
I am rarely confronted so directly. It is usually something more passive-aggressive; a sniff or a glare, once, “Why are you even here?” but, never anything quite like this.
I responded.
The tobacco companies stopped naturally aging tobacco because it took too long and the longer that they had to hold the tobacco in inventory the more expensive it got so they started kiln aging the tobacco, drying the tobacco in ovens, but this doesn’t remove the toxins. And beyond that, over time they started adding chemicals to tobacco including ammonia to increase the addictive qualities of the cigarette. Ammonia is used in the free basing process (like free basing cocaine) because it facilitates the absorption of a chemical into the blood stream so, thanks to the tobacco companies, when you smoke a cigarette you are free-basing tobacco. The cigarette is a nicotine delivery system.
Cigar manufacturers, on the other hand, age and cure their tobacco for months and years. Many of our Panacea cigars have over 5 years of aging and, during that time one of the goals is to remove the ammonia from the tobacco.
There are two basic dimensions to a cigar; strength (the amount of nicotine), from weak to strong, and flavor (the intensity of the taste), from mild to bold. Many of the cigars over the last 10 years have been very strong but the Panacea Cigar is at the other end of the nicotine scale. They are mild to medium in strength and so have very little nicotine. That is one of the reasons that I chose them for wine and cigar and beer and cigar pairings; there is little nicotine to kill your palate or give you that unpleasant (for some) nicotine rush. So where the goal of the cigarette is nicotine delivery the goal of the cigar is flavor and relaxation.
Chemically, cigar tobacco is different than cigarette tobacco, too. Cigar tobacco is primarily alkaline and harsh on the lungs where cigarette tobacco is acidic and less harsh, making it easier to inhale but cigar smoke doesn’t have to be inhaled to accomplish its purpose, flavor and relaxation. Everything that a cigar is designed to do can happen above the tongue and you do it much more like wine tasting than smoking a cigarette. Smoking a cigar is much more than puffing and blowing, you move the smoke through your mouth and in much the same way that you aerate wine to release the vapors into your olfactory senses; you can move some of the smoke out through your nose without taking it into your lungs, called retrohaling. This is where many of the subtle and complex flavors of a cigar are discovered. Ultimately, cigar smoking is much more like wine drinking than cigarette smoking.
What nicotine that you have left in a cigar is absorbed through the porous membranes in your nose which is much more important to those that smoke the stronger cigars with more nicotine. Those of us that smoke milder cigars don’t need to worry much about that.
But, the chemistry is what makes this interesting. Have you ever brushed your teeth in the morning then had a glass of orange juice? The orange juice tastes bad because the alkalinity of the toothpaste has changed the chemistry of your mouth. The acidity of orange juice now is in conflict with your taste buds and it tastes bitter. We can use this to our benefit. I can use different cigars to change the chemistry of your mouth so that the wine that you are drinking will taste better (or worse, if I wanted to).
[At this point I gave her a long description of our Green Pennsylvania Broadleaf and how it works with acidic beverages. You can find the essence of that here.]
“You know,” she said, “I stopped with the idea of bludgeoning you with the evil of smoking, expecting you to be some dumb cigar-smoking guy and I am dumb founded. Accept my apology.”
I would love to say that she was the one that smoked the cigar and saw “the light” but she didn’t. Her girlfriend and fellow nurse did. I have saved another one.
CigarVolante – making the world safe for cigar smokers, one smoker at a time.
